Monday, April 02, 2007

Kyoto: Part of the liberal tradition

That would be "small-l" liberals, the people who built the international order (UN, IMF, World Bank) after WWII. Kyoto is very much part of that tradition, and it needs to be rescued from those who would try and murder it.

Today, the earth's climate doesn't have a body as powerful as the World Bank trying to protect it. We don't have a Security Council capable of making international climate law enforceable at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. We don't even have the level of agreement necessary to work towards that kind of a body.

But it's clear, in this telling of the story, that America dramatically broke with it's history as the builder of international security when the U.S. Senate refused to ratify Kyoto. Kyoto was, as much as the Bretton Woods agreements or the UN Charter, an attempt to solve global stress before chaos and inequality lead to war. Exaggeration? Hardly...

1 comment:

I agree. The problem with neoconservatives is that they actually believe inequality is good. There will be winners and losers, where once again, it will be mainly the undeveloped world that will be the biggest losers. Of course, and this is my cynic self - it won't be till the developed nations of the world and in particular the middle class sectors are adversely effected by climate change will there be a global body created. Why I say this is because when New Orlean's got flooded and particularly the poorer sectors, the response continues to be - oh well. Notice whose homes and neighbourhoods got rebuilt? Ditto for climate change.